60 Watt Kid’s energetic live show includes six songs from upcoming release We Come From The Bright Side. Describing a recent performance, L.A. Record’s Dan Collins says, “Their brightly melancholic yawps into the void share something with Terry Riley’s live aesthetic that few electro-tinged bands can claim: an insistence upon constructing songs anew each time they’re performed…Invisible jangly loops ensnared the crowd from the moment the first song’s bubbling softness jumped into its second, more rhythmic gear, and then promptly into fifth, as singer Kevin Litrow writhed, St. Vitus style, into the audience.”

“When we play live one of our goals is to release a lot of the energy from our daily experiences,” says 60 Watt’s Derek Thomas. “One moment we are quiet, ambient, and textured, and the next we’re all in your face with sonic tribal stew. All that crazy energy from the streets, routines, authority, parents, jobs, it all takes its toll on your head and you got to get it out or you will go insane. We let that all out when we perform. And we only ask that the audience do the same. However the hell they need to do it.”

Based on word of mouth and high impact showmanship, the trio has become one of the most talked about underground phenomenons in Los Angeles. Check out an unmastered cut of “2012″ off the upcoming album. “2012″ tells the story of a brush with aliens singer Kevin Litrow encountered living in San Francisco, in which they played “time travel chess.”

The 60 Watt Kid residency inaugurates Pehrspace visionary Sean Carnage’s Monday night series at DIY space Women, commemorating the anniversary of musical mayhem “Sean Carnage Presents” has provided for four years and running.

Monday, July 6
High Castle ⋅ Italic Indian ⋅ Skull Kiss ⋅ Garrett Pierce

Monday, July 13
Protect Me ⋅ Sea House ⋅ Wah-Wah Exit Wound ⋅ Masters & Johnsons

Monday, July 20
Tender Skulls ⋅ The Myonics ⋅ Hello My Name Is Red

Monday, July 27
Shirley Rolls ⋅ The Seizures ⋅ Mikki & The Mauses ⋅ Single Mothers
Women
9:30pm / $5 / All Ages
1852 Crenshaw Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90026

About the bands

High Castle
I’m back in ear-bleeding country with the trio’s Unwound-ishly, damaged style of noisy rock, nursing an insatiable appetite for more tinfoil-scorched guitar scuzz, blown-out low end, and full-tilt drum thwackage. As each song unloads, three howling voices punctuate the maelstrom. – San Francisco Bay Guardian

Skull Kiss
Playing a weird sort of goblin-disco, but declaring themselves to be gospel, they cover everything from old gospel standards to the Misfits. And if the crowd isn’t too into them, they have it covered by piping in their own applause track. – Victim Of Time

Garrett Pierce
While you do have your aching ballads, you still have range through almost bluesy inspiration (see “Lioness & Lion”) while still having the down-tempo (see “Can I Stop Breathing?” – beauty) and even have a bit of Southern rock influences on a song like “All Through The Night.”  There is a bit of a whole package here, either that or he is still formulating if he wants to be an “at dusk troubadour” or a “late night crooner.” – Slowcoustic

Italic Indian
We wanted to go with any form of music inside of the main, the main wouldn’t have to be something specific, no matter what our music did we wanted Italic Indian to fit any music we made…Most of our stuff is digital but we started with pieces of drums, our guitars, and then we just started slowly adding these pieces of electronic equipment so that’s how Italic Indian came about and I just thought the music sounded like that. – Chugardism

Protect Me
Protect Me reminded me that there was still such a thing as electro-punk and that it was still okay to have super catchy ass songs that were no more than 2 minutes long…I had not expected such a loud boom to erupt out of the amps and speakers from such small fellows, but they made quite the combustion and the fans made quite the ruckus…I found myself tapping to the beguiling beats and muffled vocals. – Loudvine

The Myonics
The overdriven squeal-pop of Myonics was letting rip from the graffiti-doused back patio. It was like Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist projected inside a 1960s beach party movie-a lighthearted frolic of the seriously geeky young, complete with spastic dancing and bashful romance. – L.A. Record

Shirley Rolls
The core of their songs are always simple. But the lead guitar bent the music in a different direction, and the snaking bass lines made everything kind of angular. Add the heavy-handed organ, and now I’m at a loss as to how what the hell these dudes are doing-which is a good thing. – Loudvine

Single Mother
A Butter-Fly Eaten Horse Head carves flood instrumentals of heavy psychedelic anti-bluesy blues wrought from an ugly misery glow. The music suggests a soul in a splintered state while pondering an old boarded up factory jutting on a muddy, molasses river bank. This is not goddamn bullshit rock! The compositions unfurl subtle fury into dark ravines infused with twilight embers. – Matthew Proctor

60 Watt Kid sees musical instruments as electronic soundscaping devices. With analog synths, guitars, drum, harmonica, samples, and dozens of effects pedals, the band creates lush fills that cascade along hypercolor, magnetic streams—without a laptop. Comparisons to Animal Collective, Talking Heads, Cocteau Twins, and Suicide all ring true in some sense. Along this horizon, alien forms brush against passersby on the street. In fact, the lyrics of song “2012” describe an alien encounter singer Litrow experienced living in San Francisco. “The aliens transferred their information to me through a combination of alien gesturing and a game of time travel chess,” he says.

Back in poverty-stricken days, his building manager dubbed Litrow “60 Watt Kid,” as he habitually stole light bulbs from the laundry room to use in his apartment. After breaking from dance-punk band Dance Disaster Movement in 2002 and a solo acoustic period, Litrow formed a psychedelic drone pop band with multi-instrumentalist Derek Thomas and drummer Garret Pierce that came to be 60 Watt Kid. After recently moving to Los Angeles without Pierce, the band found its third ambient musketeer in Dylan Wood.

The band is releasing a new album with Oakland-based indie label Absolutely Kosher Records. We Come From The Bright Side has been mixed by producer Thom Monahan, whose credits include Devendra Banhart, Entrance Band, Vetiver, and Lavender Diamond, among others. Regarding the album title, Thomas says, “One might speculate that it is about Eastern philosophy or Indian metaphysics. But the name is kind of inside out. It’s actually more about existential exploration. Jacking into the ethos.”